1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to safety and rescue of downed or injured law enforcement, military or tactical operations personnel from a hostile environment, and more particularly, to a body harness for dragging an injured person out of danger without displacing other protective gear worn by the injured person.
2) Description of Related Art
Today, law enforcement and military personnel face more challenges than ever and the threats are increasingly more dangerous. Rescuers working to remove injured personnel in a hostile combat environment also face many challenges. Traditional methods of removing an injured person typically require three to four people on average to grab various the injured person anyway they can and drag them to safety. These methods are extremely time consuming, overly strenuous, unreliable, and extremely dangerous for several reasons. First, grabbing the protective vest or other gear of the injured person to drag them to safety can make it difficult to obtain sufficient leverage for moving quickly. Also, it is difficult to obtain a good grip and the section being grabbed may fail from the weight when the person is being dragged. Further, dragging the injured person by their protective gear causes the gear to slide up on the injured person and unnecessarily exposes them to further injury. Also, currently methods create unnecessarily longer exposure times for the rescuers, subjecting both the rescuers and injured person to continued hostile fire. Further, current extraction methods tend to cause the rescuer to disengaged from the enemy when attempting to grab the injured person, leading to potentially deadly results.
In short, prior methods of rapid extraction took more people, more time, and left the rescuer(s) and injured person exposed to the threat for longer periods of time. Accordingly, a need was realized for more efficient ways to remove injured personnel that is quick, reliable, and limits dangerous exposure of the rescuers and the injured person during extraction.
Thus, it is an object of the present invention to provide a rapid extraction body harness which not only reduces the number of people required to drag a person to safety, but also the amount of time and effort needed to do so.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a body harness that can be worn under the user's other protective gear and will slide under the protective gear so that when being dragged the user's other protective gear is not moved out of place.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a body harness that allows a rescue to drag the user to a safe location without having to disengage his weapon from the enemy.